Re: Gunman in the Colorado theater...

Posted 24 July 2012 - 05:43 PM

atraub, on 24 July 2012 - 07:26 PM, said:

jon.kiparsky, on 24 July 2012 - 04:29 PM, said:

Have to go along with you on this one, Adam. The profiling is great for generating characters for movies and TV shows, but to assume it's more than a weird psychologist's fantasy would be trusting social psych much further than I'd be willing to do.

I never thought this day would come, I was starting to think you were disagreeing with me just to piss me off.

Re: Gunman in the Colorado theater...

Posted 24 July 2012 - 09:03 PM

Women are responsible for all major issues in the world today. Global warming wouldn't exist if more women had sex with dudes that rode public transportation. But, nooooooooo, so we all have to have a car.

Re: Gunman in the Colorado theater...

Re: Gunman in the Colorado theater...

Posted 26 July 2012 - 12:41 AM

Trying to figure out how much of a burden firearms are on our society. Here's my brief attempt:
Ignoring deaths by "natural" cause, in 2007 there were 182,479 deaths associated with injuries and/or accidents.
31,224 (17.1%) of those deaths were related to firearms, and of those deaths:

613 were accidental (0.34% of all unnatural deaths and 1.96% of all firearm-related deaths)

17,352 were suicides (9.5% of all unnatural deaths and 55.6% of all firearm-related deaths)

12,632 were homicides (6.9% of all unnatural deaths and 40.5% of all firearm-related deaths)

According to "Measuring Civilian Defensive Firearm Use: A Methodological Experiment" in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology (2000)(cite) it was estimated that firearms were used ~990,000 times in defense against violent crime involving life and/or property.

Homicides involving firearms account for less than 7% of all unnatural deaths in the US. Meanwhile, firearms are used nearly 1 million times annually in defense.

EDIT:
I wanted to add a note that just because firearms are used an estimated ~1,000,000 times a year in defense it does not mean that 1,000,000 crimes were foiled. According to the research brief "Guns in America: National Survey on
Private Ownership and Use of Firearms" published by the National Institute of Justice (cite) this statistic can be misleading. This just means that, about a million times a year, people feel the need to brandish or use a firearm in defense of life or property. Whether or not they were in actual danger is of course left to the would-be victim's account of what happened. An analysis of reported defensive firearm use via police investigations might yield more accurate statistics, but it's assumed that most incidents go unreported. This is the reason that many estimates of defensive firearm usage vary wildly with some estimates as high as 3 million (most likely exaggerated or biased). Most surveys seem to agree that, at the very least, firearms are used in defense several hundred thousand times annually.

Re: Gunman in the Colorado theater...

Posted 26 July 2012 - 07:11 AM

Here's some good info from the director of training Haley Strategic Partners, a company owned by Travis Haley, a top-notch weapons trainer, former Marine Force Recon operator, former Blackwater sharpshooter, and just a general ninja (he was the clean-shaven instructor in the speed-reloading video somebody posted earlier).

Didn't click: Apparently our friend the nutjob wasn't actually wearing body armor. He was wearing an LBV (load bearing vest) to carry his shit, but LBVs don't stop bullets. Judging by the fact that this guy surrendered to police without incident, I think there's a pretty good chance that one CHL holder returning fire would have stopped him. Too bad that movie theater doesn't allow lawful CHL holders to carry (funny how CHL holders tend to follow the rules but mass killers don't).